Algorithmic Ways of Seeing: Using Object Detection to Facilitate Art Exploration
This work addresses the challenge of improving user engagement and discovery in digital art museums for museum visitors and HCI researchers, though it is incremental in applying existing object detection techniques to a new domain.
The paper tackled the problem of enhancing art exploration in digital museum collections by developing an interactive application, SMKExplore, that uses object detection to allow users to browse paintings through detected objects, resulting in a novel tool for open-ended exploration.
This Research through Design paper explores how object detection may be applied to a large digital art museum collection to facilitate new ways of encountering and experiencing art. We present the design and evaluation of an interactive application called SMKExplore, which allows users to explore a museum's digital collection of paintings by browsing through objects detected in the images, as a novel form of open-ended exploration. We provide three contributions. First, we show how an object detection pipeline can be integrated into a design process for visual exploration. Second, we present the design and development of an app that enables exploration of an art museum's collection. Third, we offer reflections on future possibilities for museums and HCI researchers to incorporate object detection techniques into the digitalization of museums.